Found You
by Dr. Psycoticus
Summary: Sequal to I'll Find You. The OC from the last story catches up to the Bebop after two years, but Ed is in town at the time. The story is split between the OC and Ed. This is not as simple as it sounds.
1. Chapter 1

FOUND YOU

He looked out at the desert, wiping sweat from his brow. He had to squint to stop the sun blinding him.

"You're a hard man to find, Jet," a strange voice yelled from behind him. He turned with a start. Sitting atop a rusted old vehicle which was beginning to be buried by wind-borne sand was a wiry young girl with wild hair dyed four different colors. She was dressed in beaten bell-bottom jeans, a ratty old vest covered in belts and holsters and adorned with countless tools over a sleeveless white shirt.

He looked at the stranger suspiciously.

"How do you know my name?" he asked carefully. The girl had a bizarre expression on her face, somewhere in between excitement and hatred.

"I know a lot more than just your name, Jet," she said, practically spitting his name. _Who is this psycho?_ he asked himself, perplexed.

"I have been looking for you for two years," the stranger said, laughing a bit and pointing a wagging finger.

"And why've you been doing that?" Jet asked carefully.

"I want to ask you for a job," the stranger said flatly, jumping down from atop the wreck. Jet couldn't hide his perplexity.

"You've been looking for me for two years to ask me for a _job_?" he said, disbelieving. The stranger answered with a simple "yeah." He tried for another moment to fit this through his head, to decide what this psycho wanted.

"What sort of a job would you be looking for?" he asked finally, deciding to play along.

"What do you need?" the stranger responded pleasantly. Jet didn't answer. "Mechanic, cook, someone else fancy with a gun?" the stranger continued to inquire. Jet looked at the stranger seriously.

"Let's suppose I don't need anything," he said. The stranger looked at him confidently.

"I don't know about that," she said. "From the looks of your crate back there I'd say you need a mechanic in a bad way."

"So I'll hire one," he said, not missing a beat. The stranger grinned oddly.

"I'll do it for free," she said. Jet was sent reeling.

"Bullshit," he said, recovering. "Nothing's free." The stranger laughed up at the sky.

"How right you are," she shouted, laughing. "However, I don't want any money." She left the old bounty-hunter to ponder this for a moment. She went on with a mad man's enthusiasm after a moment.

"For the expense of three 'hots and a cot, you will receive, along with my company, a constant mechanic who expects not a single Woolong for her services." Jet stared at the stranger carefully, wearing a determined poker-face.

"Why are you so keen on living with me?" he asked finally.

"Because I like to travel!" the stranger exclaimed. "I don't much like that whole business of people sneaking up on me with guns while I sleep, though." Jet thought about this carefully. Where had he seen her before?

"So the way I figure it," she continued. "If I'm going along with three cowboys, that's a bit less likely to happen." Jet had to try hard not to flinch. Whoever this freak was, she'd done her homework to know there were three of them.

Carefully, he decided to go along with her.

"Alright," he said. "But me and my friends get into a lot of fights, little girl-"

"My name's Terry," she corrected, angrily.

"Yeah, Terry," he continued. "But like I said, we get into a lot of fights, and I can't afford much in the way of medical bills." The stranger laughed gleefully. She was starting to remind him of Edward.

"You won't have to worry about it!" she exclaimed. "I can be handy in a fight. How do you think I got here in one piece?" The old captain considered this. If she had been following him for two years on her own, she had to be telling the truth.

Finally, he thought of something. He walked over to a crate of apples he'd bought an hour ago. Picking one of them up, he regarded the stranger.

"You got a gun, cowgirl?" he asked. Wordlessly, the stranger pulled an automatic pistol from an under-arm holster. Without giving her a chance to cock it, Jet flung the apple at her like a baseball. With reflexes like he hadn't seen in some time, she dodged to the right, pulled back the hammer and fired. He watched the apple explode, a nine-millimeter shell flying through its core.

He was impressed, even more so by the fact that she carried it with a shell chambered, but didn't let up. He threw another above his head. Another shot, and the remains of the fruit rained down like confetti. He threw three above his head. The stranger's pistol snapped to life three more times, each time destroying an apple.

Suddenly, the gun was on him. His confident smile disappeared. He'd drawn his own weapon, meaning to surprise the strange girl. He was now in a Mexican stand-off.

"Oh, come on Jet," she said like an old friend. "You really thought I wouldn't see that coming?" After a laugh, she put away the gun.

"I wouldn't shoot you," she said, smiling. "So how about it? Did I pass?" Jet put away his gun.

"Sure," he said. "Just go pay for our dock; we're about to leave."

The stranger's smile left her.

"Bullshit," she said angrily. "You paid before they let you land. You're trying to get rid of me."

"Maybe I am," Jet said, having turned and begun walking away.

The stranger cursed. He ignored her. He stopped a moment later, however, when he heard the hammer of a pistol being cocked behind his head. He cursed under his breath. He hadn't heard her take one step.

"Alright, old man," she said in a growl. "You want to know why I spent all that time trying to find you?"

"Yeah, I do," Jet said defiantly, turning to face the stranger. The stranger began speaking, keeping the pistol pointed between the old captain's eyes.

"Two years ago, you docked in a small town for repairs and re-supply. You didn't see your net-diver, Edward, that entire week." The stranger paused for a moment. "I met her that week," she said.

Jet raised an eyebrow.

"What are you telling me?" he asked. The stranger didn't blink.

"I'm telling you I fell in love with her," she said without feeling. The old captain hadn't seen this coming. He kept quiet, regardless.

"It was mutual," she stated simply.

"How do you know?" the old bounty-hunter asked defiantly. The stranger was angered by this.

"How do I _know_?" she shouted, disbelieving. "Because we couldn't keep off each other that entire week! Because we couldn't help but remind each other every ten minutes!"

Jet remained silent, expressionless. It all sounded like shit to him. Touching shit, but still shit.

"I made Edward a promise before she left," the girl said. "I told her I'd find her. Those were my last words to her: 'I love you, Ed. I'll find you.' I don't care if I have to kill you, and become a bounty-head for the murder of a bitter old prick. I'm not going to break my promise."

"You don't mean that," said Jet after a tense moment. The girl remained still, steady.

"Look me in the eye and say that," she said. The old man didn't answer.

She lowered the pistol to her side and continued.

"If you can look me in the eye and say that, I'll never bother you again."

The old man obliged, wordlessly. He looked into the girl's eyes. He started to repeat himself, when he began to see it: amongst hatred, determination, fear, the slightest hint of madness, he saw loneliness. Endless, crushing loneliness. Longing. He was by no means a romantic, but he knew people. The girl was telling the truth.

He cursed under his breath. He was a bounty-hunter. He'd shot people in the back, poisoned and drugged men's drinks. He'd always done whatever it took to win, to get what he was after. But he wasn't without a conscience.

"You said you're a mechanic?" he asked finally in a defeated voice, looking away.

"Yeah," the girl said absently. Jet looked and saw that she quite was worked up, seemingly on the verge of tears. Obviously, she didn't like talking about this.

"Come on," he said, turning to head back to the ship. He heard her follow after a moment.


	2. Chapter 2

FOUND YOU

Edward put down the circuit-board, turning away quickly so the seller wouldn't notice her and start pitching. Normally, such a thing would have thrilled her. In the last few months, however, she'd started to lose interest in things.

Thoughts of _her_ kept returning to her, bringing fresh loneliness and misery. Terry. She'd promised to find her. Two years down, and still nothing.

She started walking back in the direction of the Bebop, looking down and trying not to cry.

No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't help but remember the coldness of the air in her room last night. Terry's picture on her bed in front of her. The way the razor-blade caught the light in her dark room. The small flare of pain on the far left side of her wrist as the corner of the blade touched it. The way her tears fell.

She closed her eyes tightly, a strong grimace clear on her face. She looked down at her wrist. There was still a mark. The only reason she hadn't done it was some hope, some stupid, misplaced hope, that Terry might still come.

_God, I hate my life_, she thought. She hurried her pace to get back to the ship. She didn't feel like breaking down sobbing in the middle of the street.


	3. Chapter 3

FOUND YOU

Jet brought her around to the Bebop. Terry was almost disappointed. This was the ship she'd ingrained into her mind some two years ago. This was the ship she'd dreamed about finding. This rusty bucket of bolts was the ship she'd been chasing for two years, and with it the only person who meant a damn to her (Katy had taken cross-fire from a gang-fight shortly before Terry had left home).

The inside was a bit more orderly than the out, but not by too much. Jet provided her with the grand tour, touching on all points of his jalopy of a space-vessel (including the several hundred things mechanically wrong with it), and introducing her to Spike and Faye (individuals who, in Terry's experience, more commonly bore the monikers of That Psycho and That Flirt With the Gun). He came last to Edward's room.

"I figure you'll be bunking here," he told her in a business-like manner.

Terry only heard him in a distant way. She was somehow mesmerized by Edward's lodgings. It was a small, simple room, adorned by little more than a small bed with tattered sheets, a lap-top computer case surrounded with related paraphernalia, and a small night-stand covered with various nick-knacks.

Among these, her eyes picked out a picture of the two of them together. She walked up to the night-stand, picking up the photo. With her other hand, she pulled her own copy from a pocket inside her vest. She held the two side-by-side. On the left, Edward's copy, vivid and almost new in appearance. On the right, Terry's, time-worn and a bit faded, a little parcel carried with her through brawls, knife-fights and shoot-outs, always with her, guarded closely. They both depicted the same image of them together, Edward's arms hung about Terry's neck, Terry's hand on Ed's hip. Edward wore her frequent face of maniac joy, Terry showing a more guarded, though clearly sincere smile.

That was the smile Terry had often worn, until the beginning of her two-year chase, and her discovery of the joys of drunken blowouts with low-life ship's crews. Before her first gun-fight. Before she learned to take her kicks where she could get them.

The nostalgia was overwhelming, but was quickly undone when something previously covered by the picture caught the light. She put down Edward's copy and placed her own back in its place in her vest. Previously hidden by the photo, Terry found a lone razor-blade lying on the surface of the night-stand. She picked up slowly, bringing it to just below eye-level. On one corner, barely large enough to be visible, was a clear brown stain. Terry was intimately familiar with the sight: blood. Dried blood.

She felt terrible as the scene assembled itself in her mind: Edward, hopeless and lonely, had almost slit her wrists. For one reason or another, she hadn't gone through with it. In her hardly-diminished anguish, she'd hastily put the blade down on the closest surface at hand and covered it with their picture. Terry put the blade down. Though she'd never actually tried offing herself (she'd still had her promise to keep), she had a pretty good idea of what it was like to feel that shitty. She felt quite some relief in that she'd found Jet when she did; she hadn't been expecting a time-limit.

She turned. Jet was no longer in the doorway, apparently having appreciated the value of the moment. She left the small duffle bag she'd carried slung over her shoulder up to this point and went to ask when Edward was getting back.


	4. Chapter 4

FOUND YOU

The sun was hot. The crowded market was noisy. She looked at the cracked pavement. Trash littered its entire surface. Thickest at the sides, but present, just the same, in the middle, in the intersections, in the turnoffs. Bent, rusted cans, candy wrappers, broken glass of all sorts and colors. They were everywhere.

She'd taken to wearing shoes. Tattered, dusty, white sneakers enwrapped either foot. In such places as this, where one could practically shave by rubbing one's face on the ground, she had before, grudgingly, worn sandals.

"Can't really know a place 'till you've felt it between your toes," she used to say.

She could remember telling Terry that, once. Thinking the name made her have to choke back tears. She didn't want to really know any place, anymore. She just wanted to feel Terry's warmth, just wanted to breathe her scent, to hear her voice. She just wanted to be happy again. She didn't want to cry anymore.

She was harkened back from sad reverie by an obstacle in her path. The obstacle was a man, nineteen or twenty, she placed his age, one forty five, she placed his weight. He stood about six foot tall, wearing faded blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and a beaten black leather vest. There was duct-tape wrapped around one knee. His long, strangely pale face, pale for living here, anyway, was shaded from the noonday sun by the brim of a dusty black bowler hat. Long, squiggly points, like the tails coming off a drawing of the sun, were tattooed below his left eye. He was smirking.

Edward was immediately reminded of Alex, ala "A Clockwork Orange", a movie Terry had shown her. Terry had liked weird movies like that.

Alex had a pair of men, similarly dressed and similarly pale to either side. They each wore patched and battered top-hats.

Edward sensed trouble. She wasn't afraid; sheer depression seemed to have taken her ability to fear, but she sensed there would be unpleasantness in her future. Exasperation, really.

"What," Alex asked, when his quintet had approached close enough to stop Edward in her tracks. "Does such a youthful and potentially real thing do with such a frown on her face?"

He sounded about as weird as he looked. He spoke in an orator's voice, as though he thought everyone out to hear him ask his weird, sing-song questions. Edward didn't like him. She didn't like anyone, these days, least of all herself, but she found that she particularly disliked Alex.

"She intends to go on with her business," she said plainly. "She hopes to you and your friends will do the same. She doesn't like you, Alex, she doesn't like you at all."

The five didn't move. Alex went on studying her, unwanted shoes to unhappy face. At last, Alex laughed. It was as weird and high-pitched as his voice. Edward didn't like Alex. She _hated_ his laugh.

"Oh," he exclaimed. "She thinks, she _thinks!_" He looked to his posse. "Timbo, Derrick, I _like _this one."

One of the goons on his left nodded. He stuck a hand in the air and made a strange gesture. Edward heard hard footsteps behind her. She turned. She was greeted by a man with a taser. He was dressed much as Alex and his weirdoes. The man brought the taser to the side of Edward's neck. There was white-hot pain there for a moment. Then she collapsed. She saw Alex smiling down at her. Then it went dark.


End file.
